In France’s sleepy wine region, high-end tourism is booming

Pommard is a famous Burgundy wine village just outside the wine town of Beaune, but it is small. The last time the survey was conducted, in 2021, the total population was 440.

So imagine how unlikely it is that in recent years the town has been dominated by giant cranes because not just one, but two different Americans have been trying to create luxury hotels there. Tech entrepreneur Michael Baum bought Château de Pommard in 2014 and has yet to make much progress with his planned hotel. But Denise Dupré, who acquired the Château de la Commaraine in 2017, is confident she has transformed it into a “hotel, spa and cuvérie”for next year.

It will soon have six luxury hotels on French territory: this one in Burgundy, the consolidated Royal Champagne Hotel & Spa and a boutique hotel in Champagne, one on the left bank of Paris that is in the process of renovation and two on the Caribbean island of St .Barts.

Crucially, its portfolio also includes three wine producers, all French, as well as vineyards in the up-and-coming Cote d’Or communes of St Aubin and Monthelie, purchased in 2019 and 2022 respectively.

Dupré and her husband Mark Nunnelly, once CEO of Bain Capital and later a top Massachusetts government official, live in Boston but have been going to Paris for 35 years.

They got engaged there, have an apartment in the city and are unabashed Francophiles. France was therefore a natural target for the considerable funds at their disposal.

“We had the idea that wine and hotels were synergistic. “We had no idea it would work so well,” he says.

I have been visiting Dupré’s wine estates since 2019, but until now I have never been able to reach the dynamic 66-year-old woman, and then only through a video call.

Dupré and Nunnelly’s first acquisition outside the French capital, in 2012, was Leclerc Briant, an unusual champagne house and pioneer of biodynamic practices dictated by the moon in Champagne.

It was during a visit to the Champagne region in 2013 that the couple ate at the Royal Champagne hotel, with an unrivaled location overlooking Champagne’s second city, Épernay.

Back then, as Dupré said, “it was really poorly managed. I went and spoke to the manager and asked to see some rooms. Then the next year it went on sale and we bought it.” Simple!

Travel + Leisure magazine voted the lavishly appointed Royal Champagne Best Resort in France in 2024. With its indoor and outdoor pools, spacious spa, cycling tours of local vineyards and Michelin-starred restaurant, the tranquil inn that I remember it had been completely transformed when I spent a night there in October, right down to the satin mask they put over my pillow.

This is because Dupré has form in the hotel business. She taught hospitality management at Boston University from 1983 to 1995 and then at Harvard until she and her husband founded their own company Champagne Hospitality in 2012. She still teaches and fanatically takes photographs for her students of the “good, the bad and the ugly”. in the hotels he finds on his travels.

She reports that now that Champagne Hospitality has established itself as a force, albeit a relatively unnoticed one (I know very few people in the wine world who know anything about it), they are attracting a steady stream of property deals.

He mentioned the possibility of opening somewhere in the south of France at some point, but I would have thought an Alpine property would be more appropriate.

Dupré, still an avid skier, though now outnumbered by her four children, grew up the eldest of nine daughters in Seven Springs in western Pennsylvania, one of the oldest ski resorts in the United States and founded by her grandparents, immigrants from Alsace and Germany. His father, aware that the resort was a little below ideal for skiers, already in the 1950s developed and patented an energy-efficient snow production system. In the 80s, seeing the need for clean energy, together with his eldest daughter he developed a hydroelectric plant near the ski resort.

“I am very fortunate to have received these entrepreneurship lessons that have helped me throughout my career,” she says. (Also when she was in her early twenties, inspired by her walk to work, she designed and marketed the first women’s briefcase that could hold her shoes.)

Along with the word “exquisite” to describe what she looks for in her hotels, the word “entrepreneur” keeps coming up during our conversation. When I visited Domaine Belleville in Rully in southern Burgundy in 2022, acquired in 2015, I was surprised to meet Paul Krug, of the famous Champagne dynasty. He now makes the wine there and at the Domaine de la Commaraine in Pommard.

“What we saw [in Krug]” says Dupré, “he was a young entrepreneur who wanted to make a name for himself and had to leave Champagne to achieve it. Despite its youth it has a lot to offer. Young people have such raw talent. In my hotels we accept the maximum number of interns allowed by law. And they are always the first group I want to talk to when I visit.”

Dupré and Nunnelly have skillfully identified Mr. Fixit of Burgundy. Louis-Michel Liger-Belair of the Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair in Vosne-Romanée is his advisor and, I am told, has taken Krug under his wing.

Surprisingly, despite a surname inherited from his grandfather, Dupré admits that he is not fluent enough to carry out a negotiation in French, but insists that they have tried to have French partners and always act with “incredible respect” for history. and French customs.

Inspired by the concentration of women entrepreneurs such as Veuve Clicquot and Lily Bollinger in Champagne, she has organized two meetings of women in the world of wine at the Hotel Royal Champagne and plans another in Pommard in January 2026.

And the relative appeal of wine and hospitality? Here Dupré admits that, at least where she and her husband have invested, it is much easier to make money from grapes than from hotels.

Tasting notes, ratings and suggested drink dates in the Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International distributors in winesearch.com

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